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Socolow selected for engineering future group

Posted January 11, 2007; 06:19 p.m.

by Hilary Parker

The National Academy of Engineering has named Robert Socolow,
Princeton professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, to a
prestigious international committee to identify the greatest challenges
and opportunities for engineering in the 21st century.

Chaired by former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry, the Grand
Challenges for Engineering Committee will explore engineering solutions
for the future drawing on its members' own expertise and extensive
public input to the project's website, www.engineeringchallenges.org.
In an essay on the site, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter offers his
view of the greatest challenges facing today's world to kick off an
online discussion.

Socolow, who joined the Princeton faculty in 1971, co-directs Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative with Stephen Pacala,
professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. A joint project of
Princeton, BP and the Ford Motor Co., the initiative seeks solutions to
the global warming problem. Socolow and Pacala developed the widely
used concept of "stabilization wedges" to motivate the early adoption
of mitigation strategies to stabilize the concentration of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere.

Socolow is joined on the Grand Challenges committee by a number of
recognized leaders from academia and industry, including entrepreneur
Dean Kamen, Google co-founder Larry Page and renowned scientist J.
Craig Venter.

The committee's membership also includes two graduates of the School of Engineering and Applied Science,
Wesley Harris and Jackie Ying. Harris, the Charles Stark Draper
Professor and chair of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned his Ph.D. in
mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton in 1968. Ying, the
executive director of the A*STAR Institute of Bioengineering and
Nanotechnology in Singapore, received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering
from Princeton in 1991.

The committee will meet for the first time Feb. 6 at Stanford
University and announce its findings in September. The Grand Challenges
project is sponsored by a grant from the National Science
Foundation.